This specification relates to programs executed in conjunction with media content rendering.
The Internet is widely used to distribute multimedia information, including video and audio data. Such information can be downloaded as a file, or streamed to a client computer, where a media player application can process and output the media content to a display device and one or more speakers. The media player application can be a program written for a particular operating system (OS) on a computer platform. Alternatively, the media player can be “plug-in” based software that runs inside another program, such as a runtime environment, on a computer platform. For example, a FLASH® multimedia player program can play streamable content by running in a FLASH® runtime or an AIR® runtime environment provided by Adobe Systems Incorporated of San Jose, Calif., and using the runtime to render the media content to appropriate output devices.
In addition, media content can include associated metadata that provides information about the content to be rendered. Examples of metadata include author, publication and licensing information. Moreover, metadata can also include references to pre-exiting functions implemented in the media player itself that perform certain actions, such as recording information about media viewing patterns, showing an advertisement to a current viewer of the media content being rendered, or sending information to another computer accessible over the Internet for aggregation and analysis of media viewing statistics.